About us
Most of our work starts with a phone call nobody wanted to make
Leak Detection London 24/7 is built around the hours other firms send to voicemail. Water does not wait for opening time, so the phone is answered through the night, the first job is always to stop it, and the second is to work out what can honestly be finished before morning.
The night shift is the business, not an add-on
Plenty of London plumbers advertise an emergency number and then treat out-of-hours calls as an inconvenience to be priced accordingly. We built the other way round. The rota, the stock on the vans and the way calls are triaged all assume the worst leaks arrive at the worst time, because they do.
In practice that means the first minutes of a call are spent on your stop tap rather than our diary. Getting the water off before an engineer arrives is worth more than any survey, and it costs you nothing. Only once the flow is stopped or contained does the conversation move to what the visit needs to achieve and what it will cost.
The detection side exists because stopping water is not the same as finding where it came from. We locate hidden leaks under floors, inside walls, buried in screed and underground between the meter and the house, and because the engineers are qualified plumbers they can usually repair what they find on the same visit. Across all 33 boroughs, with local pages covering how each area's housing stock tends to fail.
What being on call means here
- Calls answered through the night, at weekends and on bank holidays
- Triage on the phone before anyone is dispatched or charged
- Isolation talked through while an engineer is still travelling
- Time band and visit type confirmed before the van moves
- Detection kit and plumbing parts on the same van
- Honest refusals: we will say when a job can safely wait for morning
Four questions that decide your night
Every call runs through the same triage, in the same order, before anyone is dispatched or quoted.
01
Is water moving right now?
A pipe that is running, spraying or pouring through a ceiling is the only category that gets someone out of bed automatically. Everything else is a scheduling question, and we treat it as one instead of charging you a night rate for a stain.
02
Can you shut it off yourself in the next five minutes?
Before anyone is dispatched we walk you to the stop tap, the isolation valve under the basin, or the gate valve in the airing cupboard. Plenty of night calls stop being emergencies during that conversation, at which point the visit moves to a cheaper band.
03
Is anything electrical in the path of the water?
Water near downlights, a consumer unit or a socket changes the order of the job. That answer moves a call up the queue regardless of how little water is actually escaping.
04
Is it spreading, or has it stopped?
A contained leak with the supply off is stable. A stain widening while you watch is not. We ask you to mark the edge of the damp patch in pencil so the answer is a fact rather than a feeling by the time we arrive.
Stabilise tonight, finish in daylight
The useful question at 2am is not what can be done, it is what should be. Forcing an entire job into the night usually costs more and produces a worse repair. This is roughly how the split falls.
Dealt with on the visit
- Stopping or isolating an active leak
- Draining down a section so the water stops travelling
- Temporary make-safe on a split or a failed joint
- Accessible pipework repaired outright with parts from the van
- Locating a leak so you know what you are dealing with by morning
Better done in daylight
- Lifting screed, tiling or engineered flooring
- Excavating a driveway to reach a supply pipe
- Work needing a neighbour, freeholder or managing agent to grant access
- Anything requiring a part that no van carries as standard
- Full detection surveys where nothing is currently escaping
On every van, every shift
The kit that turns a night call into a finished job
One method is rarely enough at speed. Carrying all four means the engineer who stops your water is usually the same one who finds the cause, rather than booking a second visit for someone else.
Acoustic detection
Ground microphones and correlators follow the noise of pressurised water through pipe, floor and soil.
Thermal imaging
Infrared shows where warm water has travelled, which is often nowhere near where the ceiling is staining.
Tracer gas
A safe hydrogen mix surfaces through concrete and screed to find what sound and heat cannot reach.
Moisture mapping
Calibrated meters show how far the water has already spread, which decides what needs drying tonight.
About LDL247: FAQs
What does 24/7 actually mean when I ring at 3am?
That the phone is answered by someone who can triage the call, not a message service that books you in for Tuesday. You get the stop tap conversation immediately, then a decision: dispatch now, or hold until the standard band opens. Both outcomes are stated on that call along with the fee.
Will you tell me not to bother calling someone out?
Regularly. A boiler losing pressure slowly, a slight stain that has not grown in a week, or a spinning meter that your water company should investigate first are all jobs where a night visit costs you money and gains you nothing. We would rather book you into the morning than sell you an hour of darkness.
Do you find the leak and leave, or fix it?
Our engineers are qualified plumbers carrying pipe and fittings, so where the leak is reachable it is repaired on the same visit. Where it is under screed, behind tiling or under a drive, the visit ends with the water stopped and the leak located, and the opening-up is booked for daylight when it is cheaper and safer to do properly.
How quickly can you get to me?
We do not publish an arrival time, because nobody can honestly promise one across London at every hour. What we can tell you is how dispatch works: the nearest available engineer is assigned, you are given a realistic window on the call, and you are told immediately if that window is going to be long enough that you should shut the supply off and wait rather than watch it run.
Do you cover all of London through the night?
Yes, all 33 Greater London boroughs, in every band. Outer boroughs are not quietly excluded from the out-of-hours service. See the areas hub for local pages, or send Leak Detection London 24/7 your postcode and the symptoms for a confirmed visit type and slot.
What does no find, no fee cover?
If we attend a confirmed live leak and cannot locate it with the methods on the van, the detection fee is waived. It needs a leak to exist: a visit that eliminates one system by system has answered the question you asked and is charged for the time. The scope is explained when you book rather than buried in terms. Repairs are always priced separately, after the leak has been found.
Ring it in, whatever the hour
The triage costs nothing, and you will get an honest answer about whether this needs a van tonight or a slot in the morning.